The Corporate Librarian

Walt Crawford has done some interesting number-crunching of academic and public library blogs, and he’s looking at whether it’s desirable to do a larger-scale analysis of blogs by library people. In a sane world, people would be throwing lots of money at him for this.* But for now he’s just gauging interest. So hop over and put your two cents in.* And while I’m on the subject of non-pony-related wishes, I’d love to see Walt, Jason Griffey and Karen Coombs (authors of a forthcoming book on library blogging) and other people I’m not thinking of right now in a roundtable discussion on library blogging - when you should or shouldn’t do it, what works, and so on. And studies of non-English language liblogs. And discussion of the recent Best Practices LLC benchmarking study of corporate libraries. And…

I’m trying to nail down what topics might be suited to a hands-on conference (and after that, I can figure out whether online or in a venue makes more sense). My initial thoughts:

• Installing a wiki
• Adding plugins to a wiki
• Installing either Movable Type or WordPress
• Adding plugins to the above
• Project management

I’m also reviewing Five Weeks To A Social Library to see what lessons I can learn from it. And I need to check out some of the resources on the Online Training Resources page on the Library Success Wiki. I’m a bit worried that I’m reinventing the wheel here.

So, heady with the renown and job offers that came in after Library Camp NYC, I had another idea based on my experiences at Internet Librarian in 2007 (as well as various librarians’ blog posts). A librarian conference consisting solely of workshops - everything from project management to installing a wiki. If there were enough people interested in leading workshops, we might even be able to split the conference into beginner and expert tracks. Heck, maybe even regional conferences, sharing materials and workshop ideas on the Library Success wiki or some other wiki.

What do people think of the idea?